SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories from the Lotus Sutra

Dogen-Zenji so cherished the Lotus Sutra that he actually carved a selection of it into his door. This, the core text of not only Zen but the whole of Mahayana Buddhism, has never lost its appeal among practitioners of the Way. Join us for our SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD: Stories From the Lotus Sutra led by Sensei Joshin Byrnes, Sensei Genzan Quennell

So, there are two aspects of concentration I’ll talk about… One is balance because we’re resting our attention on this object, let’s say it’s the feeling of the breath. Sometimes people think well, if I get a death-grip on the breath, my mind won’t wander, and actually, of course, it wanders more. Classical balance is usually talked about as between tranquility and energy. We need some presence, as Roshi said, wholeheartedness, engagement, but we also need to be relaxed, and more at ease, feeling that this is a natural thing to be doing, it’s not something weird and coercive. So, I used to use images a lot in my own practice just to kind of sense—not literally visualizing, but just a kind of sensibility like holding something very fragile, very precious, like maybe an object made of glass in my hand. If I were to grab it too tightly, it would shatter and break. But if I just got lazy and negligent, my hand would fall open and it would fall off and break. So I just cradle it; I stay in touch with it or I cherish it. That’s how we are with one breath.

…When I first began my meditation practice, that was the first instruction I ever got: “sit down and feel your breath,” and I thought, that’s stupid, you know? Why don’t I have like a more sophisticated technique being offered to me? And then I thought, Well, how hard can that be? And it was like, ha! It wasn’t that easy, for many different reasons. One reason I saw was that I had a tendency pretty well as soon as this breath arose, to kind of lean forward to get ready for the next fifty. And I realized that was a very interesting pattern for me to see, as many of these patterns we see in meditation are, it wasn’t just arising because I was sitting in a funny posture on a floor in India. It was a very strong pattern in my life: I was very frightened, I was very guarded, I was very wary; I didn’t know what might happen next. A lot had already happened to me in my life, I felt like I had to be ready for whatever happened next, and so, for me, in that time, balance looked like, settle back, let the breath come to you. I used to say to myself, you’re breathing anyway—all you need to do is feel it. Because I had so much performance anxiety, it was like I had never done it before. So, it was like, settle back; it’s just this one breath. But, of course, we can be way too far back like we couldn’t care less about what this breath feels like. We’re like so much more disconnected, maybe sluggish, sleepy, something like that. And so the balance looks different then, it’s like coming forward, meeting what’s happening; taking a greater interest in our experience.

Now this isn’t something I usually talk about as a strategy, you’ll go crazy if you sit there thinking, Am I too far forward? Am I too far back? What is this? But, we feel it. We can feel that we’re just kind of off, we’re trying too hard; we need to relax. The coming back, the recalibrating—it’s not hard. We just develop that kind of intuition, that sense, like whoa! Or, well, I really couldn’t care less about the next breath, so maybe I should come forward a little bit. And it’s all kind of in good humor, at the same time. So, balance is really a very important factor in the deepening of concentration.

And the other part, which is absolutely essential, which we’ve already talked about, is beginning again. It’s so unlikely that it’s going to be 900 breaths before your mind wanders… More likely, it’s two, or five, maybe ten, maybe one. And that, too, it’s just the conditioned nature of the mind to have that tendency, although it does shift over time, still, we’re not in control of the unfolding of events. And so, it’s not considered a linear mark of development, like, yesterday I could be with three breaths before my mind wandered, today I can be with eight, next week I’ll be with 17, then I’ll be with 48. It’s not like that, which is also something that makes the whole process more difficult to talk about because it’s easier to say, Hey! (Sunday night when I see a friend,) I started out, I could only be with two breaths and my mind wandered, now I can be with 3,000! Rather than say, I learned to let go more gracefully. I learned to sit in uncertainty more. I was kinder to myself. Those things are a little harder to measure and boast about, but that’s really the unfolding of the path. So, beginning again: your attention will go somewhere eventually, one breath, two breaths, ten breaths later. It will go to the past, it will go to the future, judgment, speculation, somewhere.

And that is an extraordinary moment when we realize we’ve been gone because that truly is an opportunity to be very different. The most common tendency of all in that moment of recognition is self-condemnation rather than compassion. It’s much more common to realize, Ooh, it’s been quite some time since I last felt a breath, and then to go in a direction like this, Oh, I can’t believe I’m thinking, I’m so stupid. I’m so bad. What an awful meditator. No one else in the room is thinking [laughter from the group]. They’re not thinking; they’re sitting here bathed in brilliant white light—they’re sitting here in bliss, I know they’re sitting here in bliss. I’m the only one who’s thinking. Why am I thinking when they’re not thinking? Well, maybe they are thinking. But they’re thinking beautiful thoughts. They’re thinking spiritual thoughts; they’re thinking loving thoughts. I’m the one who’s sitting here thinking about re-doing the traffic pattern in downtown Santa Fe. Why am I thinking about that? I’m not in charge of redoing the traffic pattern in downtown Santa Fe, and anyway, I figured it all out in the last sitting I had, I know exactly the way it’s supposed to go. Here I am thinking about it all over again, I’m so stupid, I’m so bad. That’s more common. So, what does that mean? It means, of course, we’ve extended the duration of the distraction, perhaps considerably, and it’s also, it’s so exhausting and demoralizing. So, that’s not a small moment when we realize we’ve been gone. And instead of doing that, we practice letting go, we practice starting over, we practice beginning again out of very great compassion and kindness. That’s actually quite radical.

This excerpt was transcribed from Sharon’s teachings at Upaya on April 18, 2011, recorded as Part 3 of 8 in the series “Real Happiness” with Roshi Joan Halifax. Listen to the complete talk here.